The preparations for Hurricane Milton were on a mammoth scale, as the clean-up will be. The storm thankfully lost some of its force before it slammed into Florida, making landfall on Wednesday night as a category 3 hurricane. But many more lives would surely have been lost without the massive evacuation and the deployment of thousands of national guard troops and personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
This was the second direct hit on the state in less than a fortnight, after Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 225 people in the US. The hotter ocean temperatures which worsened these storms are hundreds of times likelier because of human-made global heating, a new analysis has shown. Climate change may have increased the rain dumped on parts of the south by Helene by 50%, scientists believe. Another study has suggested such double punches could arrive every three years thanks to the continuing burning of fossil fuels.
Extreme weather is becoming the new normal. This autumn there has been heavy rain in the Sahara and flash floods in Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand. They follow spring’s torrential rain in Brazil, the United Arab Emirates and Kenya, and heavy flooding in Germany. Lethal heatwaves hit south and south-east Asia and then the Mediterranean.
What marks Florida out is the disparity between the concern rightly given to the consequences of the storms and the widespread unwillingness of many there to acknowledge the causes of extreme weather – still less the role in it that the US plays. It has the greatest planet-heating emissions per capita of the top 10 emitters. Global heating makes preparing for such events, and recovering from their consequences, more essential than ever. But it is ludicrous to take such steps without also addressing what is making them more extreme and more frequent.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, warned that Milton would do “an awful lot of damage”. Yet not only is he aggressively pro-fossil-fuel, and the signatory of a ban on wind energy infrastructure. He is a climate change denier who has signed a bill erasing the words from Florida statutes.
Donald Trump, expected to win the state in November, has lied about the federal government failing those affected by Helene. But a second Trump administration would lead to many more victims of global heating. He has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and a “scam”. His campaign has pledged to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord again if he is re-elected and to roll back the Biden administration’s clean energy drive. While they refuse to accept the scientifically established truth that human activity is heating the planet, parts of the Republican right indulge in absurd conspiracy theories, with Marjorie Taylor Greene suggesting on X that “they can control the weather”.
Kamala Harris’s backing for new fracking projects and expanded US gas production is patently aimed at voters in key swing states, but is nonetheless disappointing for that. The Democrats, however, have at least diagnosed the problem and begun to address it, albeit inadequately. The other party doesn’t even want to hear its name. Global heating is not only a fact but an accelerating phenomenon. Voters going to the polls next month should remember that Mr Trump’s return to the White House would increase the danger that the climate crisis poses to people in the US and elsewhere.
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